Book Patrol is a place where you can share in Michael Lieberman's passion for the printed word, the history of the book as an object and as a cultural artifact.

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The latest installment of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) poster series is a set of three original book-themed posters by Owen Smith.

The series features three literary icons from the Bay Area; Dashiell Hammett, Jack London and Amy Tan. In each poster a commuter is reading one of the author’s books while related imagery swirls around them.

The image above features characters from Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon while out the train window you see the sign for John’s Grill, the iconic Union Square restaurant that appears in the book.

Next is Jack London’s 1903 novella The Call of the Wild. A surreal rendering featuring a musher in a parka driving a pack of sled dogs down the aisle of a BART train with white-peaked mountains outside the
window.

Lastly, Smith’s dreamy rendition of Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club which exudes the intergenerational theme of the book.

Smith was intrigued with the fact that people who use public transportation are traveling in time and when they are reading they are transcending their travel time to travel
throughout space and time through the world of literature.

Smith is also no stranger to Dashiell Hammett. In 2008 he designed six Hammett-inspired posters for the San Francisco Art Commission’s Market Street Poster Program.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..